Robert Suits on Heather Davis’s *Plastic Matter*

Plastic is everywhere. It is interwoven with every part of human life, of course—I am typing this on plastic and virtually all of you are reading it on plastic; it wraps our food and our deliveries, delivers our medicines; even the desk I write at is part-polymer, as are our chairs, cushions, blankets—even most buildings built in the twenty-first century. It also is interlaced with our bodies, circulating in our blood and embedded in our cell walls; plastic runs through the food chain and agglomerates into geological formations. There is no environment on Earth—from the stratosphere to the deep oceans—that is not touched by plastic. In Heather Davis’s wonderfully engaging book Plastic Matter, however, this is only the starting point. Plastic, here, is both a material that constructs the modern world and one that has engendered a new way of thinking about the world. Plastic Matter is about the complex and various polymers that form the material underpinning for much of our world, yes—but it is also about how humans have come to see the world as malleable on levels ranging from the macroscopic to the molecular.

Plastic Matter is an interdisciplinary text, wide-ranging despite its brevity, and at times deeply personal, framed around the twin inheritances of settler life and plastic production in Davis’s own family. In it, she argues that the unusual and customizable nature of plastic has led modern humans to reconceptualize matter itself as literally plastic, pliable, disposable, and consumable. Davis is here engaged with and innovating on the recent growth of neomaterialist works ranging from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter to Tim LeCain’s The Matter of History—works which show that the physical characteristics and capabilities of materials shape not only our physical but also our intellectual and cultural worlds. “[P]lastic matter highlights how capitalist and colonial systems are dependent on the vitality of objects”—that is, that the bounds of material life and even thought itself are constructed by the nature of the matter we are surrounded by.[1] Plastics can be engineered to have whatever properties we want; ergo, we now think of nature as bending to our whims; plastics entangle human and nonhuman worlds through their “synthetic universality:” the fact that they are unchanged regardless of place or context.

The first chapter of the volume is the most overtly historical (all chapters range across many scholarly disciplines), covering the early discovery and manufacturing of plastics and giving a broad typology and history of the main types. Early on, a limited understanding of the underlying chemistry led to only a handful of discoveries that had limited applications, but later, material could be made with a pre-desired set of characteristics—“For the first time, matter could be manipulated at the chemical level.”[2] These characteristics allowed it to redefine a century of consumption: it was innately disposable and hence forgettable; it was techno-utopian and pointed only toward the future; it embodied sterility, and promised a strict division between the contaminated and natural, and the clean and the artificial. (Falsely, of course—one of many hauntings in the book is the simple fact that microplastics were broadly understood, their hazards noted, and ignored, all by 1972.) Davis argues plasticity promised the infinite manipulability of matter, and extends it further to the primacy of the human mind over human bodies and nature.

From there, the book explores the many entanglements of plastic in space (chapter 2) and time (chapter 3). Both chapters introduce a key concept—synthetic universality in the first—that plastics, unlike wood or even metal are or feel independent of context; and petrotime in the second—that petroleum-derived products distort and reshape time in unruly ways, folding together the deep past and future through their sheer persistence and their unpredictable and unpleasant effects (of both the plastics and the byproducts of their production) on the human body and the world. These are conveyed not only through historical and contemporary examples, but through some of the book’s many powerful photographic reproductions. Plastic flattens, Davis argues, erasing distinctions between nature and society in a way most reminiscent of the Anthropocene more broadly, and it transmits—pushing chemical harm to future generations, but also in its durability and non-degradability preserving human knowledge in media like film.

In the final chapter—perhaps the most provocative—Davis explores the effects of plastics and plastics production on life and its relations through the lens of queer analysis. This is particularly evident in the oceans, where these effects are already well-underway. Plastics are also a locus of evolution—arguably some of the first truly anthropogenic species are not domesticates but plastic-eating bacteria, which she terms our “queer kin.” One potential queer future in which reproduction is obliterated is in fact already a reality through endocrine disrupting chemicals from plastic production: “Sex, regardless of its gendered arrangements, is increasingly unlikely to create children.”[3] This presents something of a conundrum that is left open-ended in the book: how do we reconcile a recognition of the toxic harms of chemicals on reproduction and reproductive organs with a queer lens that views sex difference positively? The section closes with a meditation on the ways the idea of apocalypse posits a clean break between yourself and the future, one which goes away if we embrace the idea of non-human life as our queer kin. “Apocalypse and its associated narratives are a way to avoid responsibility… The earth and its many forms of life will continue past whatever violences humans might enact; the point is the lives that are lived now and intergenerationally.”[4]

Plastic Matter is a wonderful addition to the field of environmental humanities, and one budding neomaterialist theorists (and scholars more generally) would do well to add to their theoretical toolkit. It is also a deeply affecting and beautiful book, unafraid of taking a few risks with its narratives and methodologies. As a historian, there were times where I wished it had gone deeper into specific case studies. The story of “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana’s petrochemical refining region is at this point well-told, as are numerous other stories of chemical pollution, differential harms, activism and regulation around plastics, endocrine disruptors and other toxics, and the long-term legacies and slow violence of environmental destruction. So, too, is there virtue in brevity. But at barely over a hundred pages, there could be more done here—and it would be hard to argue that readers ought to know less about specific petrochemical products and their production and life cycles. Nevertheless, as an introduction to the role plastics have played in the Anthropocene, to the concepts of toxic pollutions and legacies, or as an explainer for queering environmentalism, this book will undoubtedly prove useful to specialists, generalists, and students alike, with prose and analysis lucid, incisive, and clear.

[1] Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 9.

[2] Davis, Plastic Matter, 29.

[3] Davis, Plastic Matter, 92.

[4] Davis, Plastic Matter, 97.